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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.